Tribler: An attack-resilient micro-economy for media | Hacker News Reader

Tribler: An attack-resilient micro-economy for media

github.com

64 pointscurmudgeon2213 comments

I like it, more ways to prove "work" without wasting CPU/GPU cycles doing literally useless math. This, I think, is the way forward with cryptocurrency.

They mention Filecoin and Storj in the writeup, but they don't go into a detailed comparison. How does this differ from those platforms? And how do they plan to overcome the initial hurdle of "getting enough people to use it that the token itself becomes desirable"?

> And how do they plan to overcome the initial hurdle of "getting enough people to use it that the token itself becomes desirable"?

Tribler has been around for almost 15 years by now I think. Don't think they suffer from having to get enough people to use a token, just like torrents. People use Tribler already because they like to use Tribler, and would probably remain doing so even if there wasn't any cryptocurrency involved. Adding the money stuff to Tribler was a later addition, if I recall correctly.

I've used Tribler out of curiosity for a year or so and the 'token' thing popped up a while ago, but then was removed again because, from what I could see, the calculations weren't working - I went from being a few gigabytes in debt to being tens of terabytes in credit within a time frame that wasn't technically possible with my internet connection, even at full throughout, which it rarely reaches (pfsense tells me).

Unless it had a strategy to counteract piracy and other illegal content, it would become a target for law enforcement as soon as it grew big enough to be relevant.

For example, one attack could be to start legal processes against key people in order to bankrupt them, or possibly jail them. This would be function as a deterrence to most people committing resources to the network.

There's enough precedent that software won't be permanently killed just because piracy and illegal content is one possible use-case (despite the fact that 'they' try, try again).

I think, partially, Tribler are attempting to find more legitimate uses for the software to guard against the perception (that I had / have) that Tribler is an anonymised bittorrent client (using tor-like node structure) rather than, as they're self describing, a bittorrent-compatible alternative to YouTube.

> "the only way to take Tribler down is to take The Internet down" (but a single software bug could end everything)

This is a very odd line, it (to me) means that either Tribler could have a fatal bug, or the internet would have to go down.

When people start moving to such projects en masse, when government loses control over what is being published, the what stops them from making such tools illegal with a stroke of a pen? Does it have any resiliency against that?

Making something illegal doesn't instantly kill the something though.

File sharing has been cohabiting the world with copyright law for decades.

Does this work in China as well?

Does Tribler work in China? I don't know.

Does killing software work in China? Not if the software is authored and / or hosted outside of China.

I’m not an expert at these decentralized technologies. How does this compare to Bitchute or Peertube or LBRY or DTube?

I don’t understand the downvotes

Surprise, surprise: it's full of child porn.

I very much like these sorts of P2P projects. I hate the fact that all of them come with a pointless cryptocurrency bolted on. Bittorrent has worked beautifully for pirates for going on twenty years without one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com